Way Out Charlotte Pike

Maybe twice if you count Babel. The current push to make gigantic data centers for AI smacks of that previous human delusion. And it will end similarly. If it were true intelligence the data-center-pushers were after, it would extinguish itself, for wisdom is not centralized but spans the ages and the people. What they are really after is simply a hangman’s noose of algorithms designed for control and extraction of wealth. It is up to all free and autonomous individuals, who want to remain so, to resist this.

And go with God. For there was definitely a time that God literally defeated AI, or more correcty “Ai.” Check Joshua in the Old Testament, King James version. Read Chapter 8 for the whole story which concludes thusly (8:28):

“And Joshua burnt Ai, and made an heap forever, even a desolation to this day.”

Spooky, no? Who would have ever thunk a city would be named Ai? It’s right there in the Bible. Believe it. Or not, at your own risk.

For a two-page PDF statement of where Way Out Charlotte Pike is coming from, please CLICK HERE.

john.arra@wayoutcharlottepike.com

I, your correspondent John Arra, eyed the cold gray sky out the window. I checked my watch. Almost time to chalk up another slow winter Saturday at Freedom Salvage Curio Shop & Trading Post. To pass the last half hour before closing, I tried to think of an original idea for my next blog post.

John Arra is a pen name I use. My real last name begins with R and is fairly unique in these parts, or any parts actually. Because of the strong and contrarian opinions I express here from time to time, I don’t use my actual surname so that those few who share it with me don’t suffer guilt or embarrassment by association. They do anyway, but that’s on them, not me.

It’s “Arra” because in many parts of the South, especially among black southerners, that’s how the letter R is pronounced. I did not know this when my seventh grade Word Wealth teacher would call me John Arra. Only later in life did I realize he was making reference to a famous late night DJ on 1510 WLAC-AM out of Nashville named John Richbourg. That John Arra was white but he had a deep voice and sounded black, and that fit well with WLAC’s claim to fame at the time, which was to play soul music.

WLAC was a 50,000 watt blowtorch heard all over the continental United States after dark. John Arra the DJ on WLAC sold a lot of baby chicks that were shipped in the mail. But John Arra also introduced a heck of a lot of people to James Brown and Otis Redding and others who needed to be heard, so what was the harm in a little cultural appropriation?

Anyway, John Arra your correspondent was close to falling asleep at the shop desk that cold winter afternoon, when suddenly the door flew open with the usual squeak and crash of loose hinges and the flopping aluminum window blind. A man burst in, tall, vigorous, intent, seemingly on a mission. He might have been 60, maybe 70. Not the profile salvage store shopper. Most are women, closer to 80.

I greeted him and let him look around in peace. He moved directly and methodically from room to room and in minutes was at the checkout desk with several small items in hand. Now that’s a good customer! He sat in the chair to await the bottom line.

After some short friendly chatter,  I realized I knew him. He was Mr. A’s son. Mr. A, the old gent who sold the homestead land in Houston County to me, the place I now affectionately call John Arra’s Erin-Tops Resort Home.

*     *     *

If you’ve heard this story before, you’ll just have to hear it again. I like to hear myself tell it.

I first met Mr. A when I came out from Nashville to look at some land he had for sale. 25 acres, and yes, the nice real estate lady said, there was water on it. Just come on out any time, she said, I didn’t need an appointment, and I could drive right in and look around to my heart’s content. She gave me directions.

I had been looking for land away from Nashville for seven years already. The city was growing like Topsy. I didn’t like the trend. Hurricane Katrina had hit New Orleans in 2005 and made me think, what if something like that hit Nashville? I started looking for land that year.

Then came the Nashville flood of 2010. It wiped out one of the two water treatment plants and the water came within inches of destroying the other one. I did not want to be standing in line for bottles of water if another natural disaster – or God knows what – came along. I wanted an escape valve, some place I could easily reach to be clear of urban chaos and to take care of those I love if need be. But finding just the right situation was proving difficult. It was already 2012. I redoubled my efforts. This placed sounded promising.

It was early summer but it was already hot as Hades – and humid. All of us native middle Tennesseans know that Hades will not just be hot but humid, too. That’s why we’re so well behaved; God gives us a taste of Hell every summer. So I got an early start on a Sunday morning and reached my destination about 8AM. I was in my trusty Jeep Cherokee, the same one whose bumper is pictured on the masthead of this blog.

Following the directions, I pulled off the state highway and watched for the realtor’s sign on the left. There were two entrances to the land there. An old beater truck with its driver door open was blocking one, so I went in the other. I slowly advanced down the dirt road lined by high brush and trees until it bottomed out at a creek where a crossroad ran along the creek, or straight ahead across the creek over a big pipe. I stopped to consider my options.

Right then a haint popped out of the weeds ahead of me! Might as well have been a haint. He did give me a start. It was a thin old man with stringy hair and dirty old worn out clothes that hung off him like a scarecrow’s. He had something in his hand, possibly a weapon. He was bent over a bit, squinting at me through the windshield, maybe ten feet in front of the Cherokee. I had a quick flashback of “Deliverance.”

Might as well get out, I thought. I didn’t come this far for the scenery. I opened the door and stood up.

“Good morning!” I said cheerfully. I still couldn’t tell what he had in his hand.

The old man looked at the ground and sort of cocked his head to one side.

“Well,” he said, “if it is, it ain’t got nuthin’ to do with me.”

Ah, I thought, once I got it: humor! He couldn’t be dangerous. I walked up to him and introduced myself, told him why I was there. The weapon in his hand turned out to be pruning shears.

“Oh, yeah,” he said. “That real estate girl told me you might be stopping by.”

He seemed relieved, too. “Mind if I lie down?”

At that point he lay right down on the dirt road – in the shade – and recommenced talking with me. “I’ve already been bush-hogging a couple of hours and this heat’s about done me in,” he said.

But he revived and rode with me in the Jeep to show me around. The hillside has an everflowing spring feeding the creek right out of a little cave pretty much in the middle of everything. That was love at first sight for me. There is more to the story, including Princess his fat little dog who was waiting in the truck for him and a county deputy who came by while we were talking. Mr. A cursed under his breath when we saw the cop. He was sure he was going to get after him about plates for the truck, but I could see what the cop was really doing amounted to a wellness check. This is a good place, I thought.

This long story short, Mr. A later tacked on three acres that included a house. It seemed at first little better than an Appalachian shack with no A.C. and spongy floors. But I am living in it to this day. Turns out, he built it himself. Along with several other houses in the area. I asked him one day how he did that, did he have an architect or what? “No,” he said, “I just ride down the road and get ideas and then I build ‘em.”

It took me an embarrassing long time to come up with the money. I figured I’d get a mortgage on it but the inspector said the place was below grade so the mortgage company backed out. The Dodd-Frank legislation had just been enacted and everyone on the transactional side of real estate was paranoid about doing the wrong thing. I had to go a very unconventional route to come up with the funds and I was just sure Mr. A would back out of the deal. But he didn’t. And nearly six months after that first meeting, the place was mine.

I think I made Mr. A mad when I called the real estate lady and asked her when he was going to remove the old truck that he left in front of the house. I was there when he came for it. He would barely talk to me. He and some lady friend pushed it out of the yard and then rolled it down the steep driveway.

Three months after that, my neighbor down the hill told me that Mr. A had died. I went to the service, graveside, in the cemetery across from the middle school. There were many in attendance. It was there that I’d met his son that one time before. Mr. A was laid to rest next to his daughter who had died as a child in a tragic accident 49 years earlier to the day he died.

Somehow, Mr. A never left my place. Not that he haunts it, but I think about him all the time. Whenever I make an improvement I wonder what he’d say about it. When it’s a hot morning and I can’t make it working outside past 10AM, I think, “Mind if I lie down?” I carry this not unwelcome feeling that I didn’t really buy the place, that he just chose to lend it to me.

*     *     *

So fast forward a dozen years. I no longer have the house in Nashville. I first moved my business from there to Charlotte for a couple of years, and then to Erin. I am winding the main business down and opening this salvage store just to stay busy and have some fun in retirement. That’s how I came to meet Mr. A’s son that slow, cold winter Saturday afternoon. Boy, was I eager to know more about Mr. A, and kindly, his son filled me in.

All those houses he built? He did all that with no more than a third grade education. And he did it without much help. He’d figured out a way to build a whole wall on the ground – the framing, the insulation, the windows, the wiring – then lift it somehow vertical and connect it to the next wall by himself. Nobody told him what to do or how to do it, and nothing stopped him from getting the job done.

Late in life, he took a tractor sideways on too steep a bank and it turned over on him, pinning him underneath with no one within shouting distance to call for help. He had a screwdriver in his pocket. He dug himself out from under that tractor with the screwdriver. It took him all day.

“Man,” I said, “he was a real Tennessean kind of guy, wasn’t he?”

“Yessir, that he was.”

“You can’t keep a real Tennessean down short of killing him.”

“I expect you’re right about that.”

That got me thinking. What is it about Tennessee? And Tennesseans?

It has been said about Southerners in general that we are marked by “irrepressible cussedness.” I have concluded that nothing describes the essence of the real Tennessean better.

Tennessee was once the frontier. It was the first wild west after the colonies for white Americans, and the first place the American Indians really took it to the whites, in a bloodletting that would last for nearly a hundred years as the frontier moved across the continent. Of course, that was mostly instigated and perpetuated in this area by the dastardly British and French. Nevertheless, it was what it was and those pioneers who came over the Appalachians to stake their claim to Tennessee were a hardy, contentious, thick-skinned and thick-skulled bunch. And funny. And creative. And all the while they were battling the Indians they were mixing with them, too, and bringing Africans into the mix as well, so Tennessee is about as melting-pot as it gets. More on that in later posts.

Bottom line, all those irrepressibly cussed Tennesseans were great unto themselves, just as Mr. A was, but the common greatness produced some especially exceptional men and women who embodied the very pinnacle of what it means to be a Tennessean – people like Andrew Jackson, Sam Houston, Montgomery Bell, and many others – whom I call “Iconic Tennesseans.” Heck, without Tennesseans, there would be no Texas. And no New Mexico. And no Hank Williams or Elvis Presley. More on all that later, too.

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Over the next few nights, especially at the end of the day when I tend to have a shot or two of cheap Kentucky whiskey, I sat on my front porch before bed and assembled some random thoughts about the characteristics most common to the Iconic Tennessean. Here are a few of them:

–  Not necessarily born here, but drawn to this place.

– Exceptionally bright, but not necessarily academically trained or suited.

– They have a vision that the mediocre or standard class of men cannot see, but may be drawn to.

– No one tells them what to think.

– They chafe at authoritarians, but often have a strong authoritarian streak themselves.

– They are not afraid to get their hands dirty.

– They may tend to be subject to a vice or two.

– They may have some degree of a political career, but it is never what they set out to do. They just have a charisma that almost makes it inevitable.

– Passionate – like Andrew Jackson’s white hot temper that made him prone to duels. They don’t tend to be a mellow lot.

– Spiritual – although they rarely warm a church pew, they have a strong sense of God or at least the supernatural.

– Not Good Family People – not for lack of testosterone or love, but their risk-taking, adventurous spirits make them challenging mates.

– They don’t mind getting a broken bone set or a wound sewed up, but you won’t find them a waiting room so that a doctor can speculate what might be wrong with ’em.

At bottom, what makes an Iconic Tennessean (an I.T.) is 100%, unadulterated, non-homogenized irrepressible cussedness (I.C.).

That whole thought process gave me the inspiration for this post. And more posts later, about the Iconic Tennesseans who shaped America because it seems that Tennesseans have gotten watered down in recent decades. Too many just to go with the times, a bunch of conformists and snowflakes who have lived too easy and shrink from a challenge. But if we reach down into the well and bring that essential trait to the forefront again, I believe real Tennesseans like Mr. A and the Iconic Tennesseans they produce can save America from the troubled times we face today.

Challenges like A.I., for example. Believe me, A.I. is no match for an I.T. fueled by I.C. But more on that later.

*     *     *

Shortly before Mr. A’s son left my shop, I mentioned how nervous I had been that I would fail to buy his dad’s place because of how long it took me to get the money together.

“Oh, I remember that,” he said. “ Dad had other offers. Even better offers. And with ready money.”

“Then why didn’t he take them?” I asked.

“Because he liked you. He wanted you to have the place.”

Now I feel bad about making him move that truck!

Ah, what the heck. Mr. A wouldn’t have been happy if he didn’t have something to fuss about. It was just a matter of one irrepressible cuss rubbing up against another.

*     *     *

I don’t know why Mr. A’s son came into my shop that cold winter afternoon. Maybe he has a thing for junk shops. Maybe he just did it on a lark. Maybe he knew it was my shop and he wanted to know something about the palooka who bought his dad’s land. But I’d like to think that he came in because Mr. A sent him.

For a two-page PDF statement of where Way Out Charlotte Pike is coming from, please CLICK HERE.

john.arra@wayoutcharlottepike.com

Now that President Trump has started the work of dismantling the Department of Education – or at least exorcising its worst demons – there is no longer any excuse for the states’ simply letting public schools rot.

Especially here in Tennessee. Tennessee has it all. Despite the illusion that Nashville is the “it” city, Tennessee was on the map long before the party-bus girls, the hapless Titans, and the ugly condos that the capital city has become known for. Since nearly the very beginning of the nation, Tennessee has forged a long tradition as a frontier state that attracts great people and inspires great things.

So how can we as 21st century Tennesseans sit here and let so many of our public schools suck? Suck so badly that we think the solution is to give taxpayer money to parents so they can spend it to send their kids somewhere, anywhere else?

Certainly there are times and places for private schools and home schooling – if for no other reason than to provide healthy competition for public schools. But public schools are the one community asset in which every single citizen has a stake. Shame on us if we do not take better care of our schools which should be the very jewels of every community, whether we are talking small towns out in the country or small towns like Bellevue within bigger cities like Nashville.

And everyone knows what the problem is with public schools, especially high schools, but rarely is it talked about: They are too damn big. Forced busing started the trend fifty years ago. The forced busing has been stopped but the mania for ever bigger, ever more comprehensive, ever more impersonal, inefficient, and unwelcoming monoliths has continued.

Tennessee can lead the way in reversing this trend, not just with charter schools but by reopening community schools like Pearl (not as a magnet school, but as North Nashville’s pride and joy once again), Cohn, West, East, North and so on, and scaling back the behemoths like Maplewood and McGavock and Hillsboro to serve just their immediate vicinity. The excess space at the big existing schools can be use for health clinics, food courts, workout gyms, day care centers, small-business incubators, you name it. The point is to scale back the scope of the schools so that each one will once again be the hallmark – and nerve center – of its community.

Don’t just throw the Feds and their 10% with strings attached out, but the state, too. Make home rule mean something in education, and start right here in Tennessee. The state can play a role in defining districts and setting standards, but each community’s school board should set all policy – from uniforms to unions, from tracking to testing, from cell phones to prayer, from personnel to pedagogy, from sex-ed to sports. And the schedule. How about Memorial Day to Labor Day so kids have a real summer vacation once again?

Even though the physical frontier has moved far to the west and fallen into the sea, Tennessee can still be THE frontier state that attracts great people and inspires great things. It starts with making our schools again the envy of the nation. And that will be accomplished, just as it was with each homestead in early Tennessee, by starting small.

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For a two-page PDF statement of where Way Out Charlotte Pike is coming from, please CLICK HERE.

john.arra@wayoutcharlottepike.com

President Trump’s idea to move the current residents out of Gaza so that it can be rebuilt is bold, but it is nothing new.

Starting in the 9th century B.C., the Assyrian kings Ashurnasirpal and his son Shalmaneser III began a campaign to conquer and rule much of the Middle East stretching from today’s Turkey, Iraq, and Iran all the way along the Gaza coast to Egypt. They were so successful mainly because they had a new technology – the wheeled siege machine, featuring a battering ram. Once they won each war along the way, they had a policy of deporting the peoples they conquered to some other part of their empire. This made it harder for the new subjects to organize a revolt.

It is due to this policy that the Israelites were moved to Babylonia. When they were later allowed to leave, many chose not to, because the Assyrians’ policy had also dictated that families be left intact, so many Jews had settled into life abroad, intermarried, and prospered. These were the Samaritans. They were Jews of “impure” blood.

Like all before and after, the Assyrian empire eventually fizzled out. Trying to govern in that area has always been like building a house on shifting sands. But let’s hope Trump’s ideas get some traction and Gaza – and the Israelis – can finally find some peace and prosperity.

(A tip of the hat to Jean-Pierre Isbouts’ Great Courses lectures in “The History and Archaelogy of the Bible” for the historical information.)

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For a two-page PDF statement of where Way Out Charlotte Pike is coming from, please CLICK HERE.

john.arra@wayoutcharlottepike.com

Despite the disappointing cancellation of outdoor activities, the Trump team managed to pull off a festive day befitting the dramatic comeback and about-face that his re-election signified. And although it resulted from a snafu, nothing exemplified the American spirit the MAGA movement re-embraces than Carrie Underwood’s a cappella rendition of “America the Beautiful” immediately after President Trump took the oath of office. If you watch the right video of the sequence of events, after it was clear that the producers could not get the background music to play, you can see her mouth the words, “I’ll just sing it.” And she did. And it was probably even more beautiful than it would have been with the planned production because it came straight from her heart. That’s the American spirit!

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For a two-page PDF statement of where Way Out Charlotte Pike is coming from, please CLICK HERE.

john.arra@wayoutcharlottepike.com

It’s the question on everyone’s mind as history barrels toward January 20, 2025. No one wants to say it out loud, however. No one wants to jinx the refreshing, optimistic breeze in the air since Trump’s de facto re-assumption of the presidential chair after he generated a margin of support too big to rig. GREAT is knowing that people who are competent, who love the country, and who have common sense will be steering the ship again, this time with wind in their sails.

Meanwhile, we hold our collective breath. For the moment at least, “they” have been beaten back.

Who are “they?”

“They” are the Club and the Jealous Seizers.

The Club is the puppet masters, those who everyone knew were pulling the strings behind Obama’s presidency, who then stole the 202o election for Biden, and who followed that by nearly putting the most embarassing, disliked, and feckless woman in the world ahead of Trump in 2024. The members of the Club are shape-shifters, hard to identify, shadows who move along the walls and dark corners of the world, working constantly to enslave its population.

Think the Rolling Stones’ “Sympathy for the Devil.” The devil is described as a “man of wealth and taste.” That would, indeed, be the Club. But, Mick Jagger sings, “I shouted out, ‘Who killed the Kennedys?’ when after all, it was you and me.” The man in this song, whether you call him Satan or collectively, the Club, is the motivating force behind every bad turn in history. And as they say, all it takes is good men to do nothing for evil to prevail. So if the Club prevails, it is on you and me. We must stop the Club.

The Jealous Seizers, on the other hand, are easy to spot. They are the grasping Clintons and Obamas and Bidens and other second-string grifters of this world like the Hochuls and Whitmers and Newsoms. They will stop at nothing to weasel their way into the ranks of the Club. Though, they will never get there. They might control for a time the kingdoms of the world just as Satan promised Jesus as they looked down from the mountain, but God – aka Love – always wins in the end. So the Jealous Seizers pop up, and then when their time is up they scurry back to their holes, just as the Obama and Biden clans are doing now.

But there are always more climbing Seizers, and the Club never sleeps. The Club’s stench is all over the dead of Ukraine and Russia. All over the Christians persecuted in the Middle East. All over the imprisoned populace of Hong Kong and the Uyghurs in concentration camps in Red China. And all over the last vestiges of slavery that still survive in darkest Africa.

We average Americans are happy that maybe with Trump’s reelection we get to keep our natural gas stoves and our guns and other private property. That maybe the gasoline that runs our cars will get back down around $2 a gallon and inflation deflated. That maybe the cult of death, the pushers of abortion and euthanasia, will be beaten back. That maybe we won’t lose jobs over our private medical decisions. That maybe huge, faceless monopolies won’t control our every move and thought. That maybe an overwhelming influx of illegal aliens won’t drag us down to third world status. That maybe our kids will be shielded from sexualization, pedophilia, and transsexualism. And that so many other basic rights of individual and national sovereignty might be protected.

But we should not kid ourselves. Those are all minor skirmishes in the war that the Club is waging on the American Republic, aided and abetted by the Jealous Seizers. They will be back. We must all be on guard. And pray that “they” don’t do Trump in before the will of the people can take back the levers of power.

Meanwhile, enjoy the breeze and let’s pray that January 20 doesn’t become America’s Ides of March. Then we will all be able to breathe easier.

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For a two-page PDF statement of where Way Out Charlotte Pike is coming from, please CLICK HERE.

john.arra@wayoutcharlottepike.com

President-Elect Donald J. Trump has announced that Marco Rubio will serve as Secretary of State. Tom Homan will be the border czar. Susie Wiles will be Chief of Staff. Stephen Miller will be in charge of policy. Governor Kristi Noem, Homeland Security. Green Beret Mike Waltz, NSA. And the hits keep coming.

These are serious people with a drive for excellence. Such a contrast to Pete Butigieg and Anthony Blinken and Alejandro Mayorkas and Merrick Garland and the whole slew of other miscreants and weak sisters who have been filling the positions of the Biden administration.

Let’s hope President Trump already has someone unnamed who is whipping the Secret Service into shape. For the piggies are squealing. The bureaucracy has a stomach ache. The Deep Staters and Globalists and Leftists in general are writhing like wounded animals from their electoral rejection. They could strike wildly back in any time, like squatters’ setting a match to the house from which they have been envicted.

We need the serious people to take office in January to stop the senseless carnage in Ukraine. To check China’s shameless and reckless ambitions. To bring our military back to regular order. To bring justice back to the courts. To clean up the elections that neither side trusts now. And to give hope and breathing room to the American people so that they will stand up and build businesses and strong families and show the world once again what free citizens in a democratic republic can achieve.

Godspeed!

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For a two-page PDF statement of where Way Out Charlotte Pike is coming from, please CLICK HERE.

john.arra@wayoutcharlottepike.com

Serious students of the War Between the States understand that slavery served as the bone of contention, but what actually caused killing was the inability of political forces to settle the dispute.

When decades of political maneuvers designed to deal with the Peculiar Institution failed to satisfy either side, emotions took control, the South got belligerent, and Lincoln got intransigent. America was soon on the march to a million casualties among friends, neighbors, and families.

Before the human carnage, the first casualty was critical thinking. Case in point: One of the earliest and strongest advocates for abolition was named William Lloyd Garrison. He was the kind of guy you don’t want to get stuck sitting next to on a plane. Although on the right side of important issues, he was annoyingly judgmental and strident about it. Another of his pet causes: temperance. The temperance movement led to the banning of alcohol decades later, which became known as Prohibition.

We all know how Prohibition turned out. It spawned organized crime and made bad drinkers worse, proving that you cannot legislate against human nature. If critical thinking had been applied to the issue instead of zealotry, a compromise might have averted an egregious misuse of federal power in a Quixotic attempt to stamp out a vice that will never go away. And should not go away.

Critical thinking would have led to common sense: Human beings need their vices, at least in small measure, in order to tolerate other, annoying human beings like William Lloyd Garrison. The application of common sense would have led to compromise. Instead, Garrison and subsequent extremists pushed people and politicians into corners they had to fight their way out of.

Wokism is a thing tailor-made for extremists, not unlike abolition or prohibition. Although at least in abolition there really was a just cause: everybody today knows that slavery is, was, and always will be wrong. And anyone who encounters a drunk thinks, rightly, something needs to be done about that. Yes, it does, but that begins in the soul of the drinker. The government certainly has nothing to do with saving souls.

The thing about Wokism is, there is no real evil – e.g. slavery, or sloppy drunks – that Wokism defeats. Instead Wokism is all about boogey men. Wokism was created not to solve an evil, but just to cause the schism, the division and discord that we see all around us among people today, just for the sake of the discord.

Wokism eludes strict definition, but certain Woke obsessions are readily identified. Let’s start with the most obvious: Sex. Not gender; SEX. Gender is a word used in language study; sex is a biological fact. Wokists seized on gender as some sort of highly important word to the complete exclusion of what is actually, fundamentally, really importantly, sex.

It started with gay marriage. Already by the 1990s, all decent, civilized people had accommodated homosexuality. Don’t ask, don’t tell was a great example of common sense applied to a human quirk in order to live and let live. Practicing homosexuality was safe in western civilization for perhaps the first time anywhere in world history.

But no, that was not good enough for the extremists. They couldn’t settle for tolerance, they had to achieve acceptance by cramming buggery down everybody’s throats. With the 2015 Obergefell decision – a tax case, for goodness’ sake – they found the crack for their crowbar and wrenched the institution of marriage wide open. The next thing you knew, children were growing up with two daddies, or two mommies, and biological sex was nowhere in the equation. Parenting was nothing but a legal construct.

So now “Pride” is celebrated for a whole month as if it were Christmas, and Wokism-befogged parents even drag their innocent children to parades celebrating sodomy. And for that matter, to drag queen story hours. Actions which, a very short while ago, would almost universally been considered child abuse.

(At this point, if you yourself have been infected with the Wokid Virus, you will react by calling this deprecation of same-sex marriage “hate speech.” Except, if memory serves, prior to Obergefell every statewide same-sex marriage referendum failed except one. And that exception was not even California. Even Barack Obama came into his presidency refusing to endorse same-sex marriage. So… yesterday’s prevailing wisdom is today’s hate speech? Not in any sane world. And no, opposing same sex marriage is not homophobic, any more than opposing intemperance means you hate all drinkers.)

Because: the obsession didn’t even stop at the oxymoron gay marriage. This kind of magical thinking led next to grossly hairy men pretending to be women and demanding special rights for it, like getting to use the ladies’ room and to bunk down in women’s prisons. And worse, it filters down to kids who get attention by defying their sex in order to choose a gender and then watch the whole adult world around them go to pieces over it.

And it goes completely off the rails when serious deranged males demand to compete against females, and then glory in trophies and world records and acclaim from equally cuckoo Wokists. The unintended (or is it intended?) consequence of such behavior is that when women are finally getting their due for sports achievement, it is being snuffed out. And even worse, some Woke, or demonically greedy, medical professionals start drugging the kids and lopping off body parts for profit, sometimes by fooling the parents, sometimes because the parents are just pathetically clueless human beings…

Bottom line, nothing exemplifies Wokism more perfectly than this whole mess over sex.

You can take that kind of mental dysfunction and apply it to any number of other issues. Bad weather, which must be man’s fault. Ukraine, arguably the most corrupt country in the world and no kind of democracy, but which somehow must be defended against big bad Russia. And for that matter Russia, who should be our best ally against the Godless, despotic, genocidal, slavery-practicing CCP, but in Wokism’s thinking: Putin bad, Zelenskyy good. So there go another million casualties in a needless war.

It is all exhausting to the critical thinkers still left in this world. None of it makes any sense. Unless you realize it is all by design precisely for the purpose that indeed, nothing does make any sense.

Now we are one week away from the presidential election. Those who want to to make a nightmare out of the American Dream are working their Woke black magic for all it is worth. How appropriate, here at Halloween.

The scariest thing about the support for the Wicked Witch of the Woke, Kamala Hussein O’Harris, is that it is not coming from the less sophisticated people of this civilization. True, it is coming to a great extent from the chip-on-their-shoulders crowd, who range from low to high in IQ, but the most disturbing thing is to hear well-educated, otherwise sober and responsible people compare Trump to Hitler, assert that Harris is a morally superior person to Trump, ignore her vapid word salads, and so forth. Their denial of reality is hard to swallow.

It’s no use talking in terms of sin and faith with Wokists, but there’s an axiom in the religious world that applies at least metaphorically here: Satan’s greatest trick is making you believe he doesn’t exist. Wokists are buying tripe that they would have never accepted just a few years ago. That you shouldn’t need an ID for voting. That the “vaccines” were safe and Ivermectin is just for cows. That mail-in ballots are a civil rights issue. That January 6 was really an insurrection. That open borders is just being neighborly. That Joe Biden campaigning asleep in his basement got more votes than not just Donald Trump, but Barack Obama as well. Or that the economy is OK.

Well, that last one can be explained. Most of these people are in the upper middle class, insulated from the ravages of inflation by 401Ks, the Fed’s manipulation of stocks, daddy’s money, insurance settlements, alimony, gated communities, and the like. They can buy EVs just to show off. Meanwhile small buinesses have closed by the thousands, and even Walgreens and CVS and True Value and 7-11 and K-Mart and other retailers serving the lower classes are reeling. All while country clubs seem to be doing just fine. Everybody below the middle-middle class has just flat run out of money thanks to government-caused inflation.

The lotus eaters in the upper middle class who profess to support Harris and Walz over Trump and Vance have each had a catheter installed in their main mental artery. It is called a smart phone, or more accurately a social phone. The phones deliver Wokist nonsense to them via the maelstrom of Facebook, Instagram, Tik Tok and any other app du jour. That is, when they aren’t using the phones to bet on sports, look at porn, or compare themselves to the Joneses. It seems that they cannot get their noses out of their cell phones and into a book, or a real newspaper, or Bible study. They are being manipulated and brainwashed via that catheter. And like Satan’s greatest trick, if you try to tell them this, they won’t believe you in a million years. You Luddite.

Not everyone, of course, who uses social phones falls for the propaganda. Consider social drinkers who can have one or two at a party, or as a nightcap, and live their life sober and happy. These social phone suckers are not social drinkers. They think they can control it. They can’t. They dive in until they hit the bottom of the bottle or pass out, whichever comes first.

Whether or not Trump has indeed made this election too big to steal, the Wokist-baiters among us are going to use it one way or another to steal what remains of peace and civility from this country, whether it is by undermining a new Trump presidency or further humiliating this proud nation via a Harris coup echoing the Biden steal.

The crack in which they are putting their crowbar this time is the Wokism schism. It is tearing apart generations and families and friends no less dramatically than did the Civil War. As disturbing as the division in this country is now, God help those of us who have not prepared adequately for the chaos that is about to ensue. It will get worse before it gets better.

If Trump is given the win, expect comebacks from Occupy, Antifa, and BLM, and a succession of events truly worthy of the name “insurrection.” If the Deep State steals it for Harris, expect gas prices and inflation generally to spike again, the stock market bubble finally to burst, and our enemies throughout the world to make their moves. The goal and end result will be the elimination of the middle class. From top to bottom. Ironically, those same upper middle class Wokism sympathizers will be wiped out along with the hoi polloi.

And by the way, that pest William Lloyd Garrison’s other big “cause” besides abolition and temperance? Women’s suffrage. Again, he was on the right side of the issue, and at least his polemics this time didn’t lead to Civil War or Prohibition. But nothing is perfect: No doubt we have to contend with Knucklehead Tim Walz as a potential V.P. thanks to the Manchurian cat-ladies’ votes enabled by women’s suffrage.

Case closed against the extremists.

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For a two-page PDF statement of where Way Out Charlotte Pike is coming from, please CLICK HERE.

john.arra@wayoutcharlottepike.com

Don’t misunderstand what is meant by the following statement which you are going to hear everywhere else between now and November 5th: The coming election is the most consequential in the history of America.

Most places you see or hear that, the purpose is to exhort voters to support either Donald Hoppin’ John Trump, who can dodge a bullet with the flick of his head, or Kamala Hussein O’Harris, who can dodge a question even quicker.

But not here. The purpose in mentioning it here is to exhort you to get ready. Because no matter who takes the presidency on inauguration day in January 2025, this election marks the beginning of a period of chaos the likes of which America has never seen since the firing on Fort Sumter.

That’s the bad news. The good news is that on the other side of all the chaos, America will survive, America will be reborn, and America come back better than ever. How long that will take is the question.

The new book Farmie: Retaking Dickson by Docker Jim is a fun but all-too-possible imagining of how that rebirth might look. Despite it’s dystopian setting, it is a story of hope – a hopeful dystopian thriller. Get ahead of the crowd and order your copy today.

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For a two-page PDF statement of where Way Out Charlotte Pike is coming from, please CLICK HERE.

john.arra@wayoutcharlottepike.com

Some say Donald Trump is a great debater. Maybe on substance, yes. But not on style. He is like a boxer who stands with his feet spread apart, throwing strong right after strong right. He does not float like a butterfly and sting like a bee. In debates past, he would throw the same punches over and over, hitting the gut of his opponent solidly, but not getting past those gut punches. It was often tiresome to watch.

In this debate, he threw in a left hook occasionally. And not just against Kamala Harris. He connected by holding the ABC moderators to account as well, by correcting the record they would try to spin. Make no mistake about it, the moderators were shamelessly in the fight against Trump, contradicting him at points and never taking Harris to account.

You could see it in the graphics as well whenever Trump and Harris were on split screen. ABC took great pains to minimize the contrast and mute the colors in Trump’s camera, while they presented Harris with high contrast and bold colors. Go back and look. Even the background, which should be the same, was pale on Trump’s side and vivid on Harris’s. He even seemed a little out of focus while her camera was sharp. In the rare wide shot, you could see her lilliputian podium designed to make her look taller. That was laughable.

But while Harris didn’t win against Trump on substance, she did overcome her own worst demons. She came loaded for bear with one-liners and distortions of the truth, such as the tired old assertions that Trump said that there were fine people on both sides in the Charlottesville mess and that he incited the riot on the Capitol and that police died there. She suppressed her insane cackle and avoided trademark meanderings into the nature of time and her love for school buses. She seemed a little nervous at first and had a forced “jouyousness,” though that had faded after the first half hour. You could tell she had to keep reminding herself that she was supposed to be joyous after that as she had to spin the Afghanistan and Ukraine and inflation shituations, somehow blaming both on Trump. Bottom line, though, she did not hang herself as Joe Biden had done in the previous debate.

This will most likely be the last time before election day that Kamala Harris will be challenged. Metaphorically, she will be sent back to the basement like Joe Biden in 2020. After all, this is Barack Obama’s sphincter-tightening time. Worse even than the paddleboarding embarassment. As much as he just wants to be the too-cool-for-school puppet master, this is his endgame. If he cannot push Harris over the finish line, he and his legacy are finished. And pushing her over the finish line means making her appear to be the better candidate.

So first the real Kamala Airhead Harris has to disappear. This has to happen for verisimilitude, just as in 202o when somehow it had to appear that Joe Biden actually got 81 million votes. Now in 2024 comes the magic show to make it look like Harris too can really defeat Tump on bona fide votes from bona fide voters. Will America smoke the crack in the pipe Obama hands them again? Last time, the “there’s no evidence” line worked on enough people. This time… well, we shall see.

What happens next makes last night’s debate a moot point. Next is the railroading. The Anschluss. The train of globalist tyranny that is running on a track right through the divide of the American electorate. Harris and Obama are just useful idiots in that process but Trump will do his best to stand in the way, slugging it out the whole time. It’s hard to believe he might stop that train somehow, but if anyone can do it, it is Donald J. Trump.

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For a two-page PDF statement of where Way Out Charlotte Pike is coming from, please CLICK HERE.

john.arra@wayoutcharlottepike.com